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Lithium metal battery with over 500 Wh/kg developed (www.notebookcheck.net)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17926125

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[–] 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The thing is when gasoline is used to power a car about 80% of the energy is loss to heat and only about 20% is used to actually move the car on average. It’s worse when you are doing acceleration and better when cruising at a steady speed on a level surface.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah, so you have to divide it by a factor of 5. Which still makes gasoline roughly 5 times as energy dense than this prototype battery, instead of 25 times.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Another problem is the increased complexity of fossil fuel vehicles, specifically in stuff like the engine, gears, pollution filters, etc. A fossil fuel vehicle is just intrinsically more complicated. Which doesn't directly relate to the density, but it gives electric vehicles an advantage.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    The weight itself is an engineering challenge.

    With passenger vehicles, the problems have largely been solved. With motorcycles, there are still some tradeoffs on range (especially highway). With large cargo trucks, the weight causes issues with range, weight capacity, and charging times. With aircraft, there's not really competition on the horizon.

    And electrification of heat production itself for climate control, cooking, hot water, industrial processes, etc. is coming along, too, on an application by application basis. (But note that the energy "lost" to heat is less of a factor for these uses.)

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